A director is the creative intelligence behind a film, the organizing principal who determines the look and tone of the story to be told. It seems a mysterious job to me, for it involves coercion and collaboration as well as the single-minded expression of what - if the film is to succeed as a work of art - must necessarily be a personal vision. It is a job more like that of a college football coach or a general contractor than like the job I have.
Writers are free to withdraw, to dwell in the cool, dim cells within the mind. They need not cajole or prod or bargain or compromise. They issue what they will, withhold what they will, and await the world’s judgment at a remove from the kind of fiscal consequence that attends the decisions of a director working with the money of others. I can go all day without saying much to anyone, without asking or being asked for anything, and still do my work.
Yet because I write about movies, people tend to ask me to comment on what directors do, and the only measure I really have for how well a given director does a job is the final product. While some of us have problems assigning hierarchical ranks to something as complicatedly alive as a motion picture, it is evident that some movies are better than others. And while we cannot hold any one person responsible for the production of a bad movie, the director is the designated credit-taker and the designated goat. It is a useful fiction to refer to Lincoln as a Steven Spielberg film - it takes a fairly large village to realize a project of that scale, and it is impossible for us to know exactly how hard a given director leans on his cinematographer or leading lady.No doubt good movies have been made in spite of idiots, but I am in no position to say that. I only look at the screen - there are limits to how well I can see around the sides of things.
And so I don’t pay too much attention to votes and awards, to the superlatives handed out by Hollywood promoters. I will note that I think it odd that the director of this year’s Best Picture Oscar-winner, the completely rehabilitated Ben Affleck, was not nominated for the Best Director award, though I can understand how someone with more insight or a different perspective might justify such a vote. I imagine that some films are more difficult to assemble than others, that the degree of difficulty of realizing a given project might be factored into the equation. I am not naive enough to believe it is all that complicated - I know that people needn’t be bound by logic when filling out a ballot - but I understand that some people can make a distinction where I cannot. I think the only way to determine the best director is to discover the best movie.
I believe Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty is the best movie I saw in 2012, although I wouldn’t have had a problem with any of the other eight nominated pictures winning that particular Oscar. Argo was a very good Hollywood movie, very much in the mold of a lot of Best Picture winners, and I enjoyed it very much. But I can say with some confidence that Zero Dark Thirty was better, that it was tougher and truer to the ways that human beings actually behave, that it resonated more deeply and affected me more than Argo. But I understand that most people don’t care about that - they go to the movies to be transported - and that most people would rather enjoy the uplift provided by a film like Argo than be challenged by the morally complex world delineated in Zero Dark Thirty. At a fundamental level, I understand this is merely a preference - a question of taste - but it’s my preference and it informs almost every choice I make. I see a lot of movies - I like those movies that feel less manipulative and less fantastic than those people typically look to for “escape.”
But, as has been much commented upon, Bigelow didn’t win the Best Director Oscar either. Like Affleck, she wasn’t nominated - probably because there was a substantial political backlash to Zero Dark Thirty.
Some people considered it an apology for the “enhanced interrogation techniques” - the torture - that agents of the U.S. government engaged in during the decade-long hunt for Osama bin Laden. I didn’t think that was what the film was, but rather than write about that (again) I’d prefer people see the movie and make up their own minds. I think Zero Dark Thirty is a nuanced and balanced fact based fiction that raises some important and possibly irresolvable issues about what it means to live in a world where people who are prepared to do you great violence have the means to realize their fantasies.
It is not a feel-good story; it does not valorize violence in the way the typical Hollywood actioner does. I wouldn’t, but one could maybe make an argument that blow-’em-up fantasies like the Red Dawn or Die Hard movies are “fascist” works; but Zero Dark Thirty is too somber and clear-eyed for that.
It also contains what may be the best scene I watched this year, the film’s final scene, which is only about a page long and has about 40 words of dialogue, all spoken by the pilot of a C-130 cargo plane charged with flying the CIA analyst Maya (played by Jessica Chastain) away from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, after the successful Navy SEAL raid on bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. The pilot is a bit confused, since Maya is the only passenger on his manifest, and she’ll be flying alone in the plane’s cavernous hold. (In reality - and in the script - the plane wasn’t a C-130 but the larger C-17. Budgetary considerations led the filmmakers to settle for the C-130.) He allows that she “must be someone important” to command such treatment, and then asks:
“Where do you want to go?”
The question is an invention of the screenwriter, Mark Boal, and it echoes the final scene from Michael Ritchie’s 1972 The Candidate, when Robert Redford’s newly elected senator asks his campaign manager (Peter Boyle), “What do we do now?” The pilot is essentially an audience surrogate, a stand-in for the American people: What do we do now that our Great Satan has been dispatched? Whither this War on Terror now?
It’s a savvy question - but the scene is made by Chastain, who doesn’t respond verbally. Instead we watch as a dozen or more emotions wash across her particularly expressive face; waves of relief jammed by the reverb of regret and finally tears of exhaustion and possibly the realization of how small this discrete victory actually is. You tell me, what’s she weeping for? Her youth lost to trailing a terrorist.
How much we credit Bigelow for this is open to debate. Boal wrote the question, Chastain played the part, and a literal army of support personnel made the scene possible. What does it mean that Bigelow directed it? Maybe she simply got out of the way.
Maybe part of the reason Bigelow wasn’t nominated for Best Director has to do less with the political firestorm that surrounds her movie than the simple fact that she won her Oscar for 2008’s The Hurt Locker. People vote for all kinds of reasons, and I imagine that part of the reason Ang Lee won the Best Director Oscar (he also won for 2005’s Brokeback Mountain) had to do with his general popularity. I don’t know him (though I’ve met him on a couple of occasions) but I understand he is extremely well-liked by his peers.
That’s not to say his Life of Pi - which was also a Best Picture nominee - isn’t a worthy movie; in fact it is an astonishingly well-realized film adaptation of Yann Martel’s novel that, better than any other recent example, demonstrates how movies are literally “magic,” in that they are illusions that deceive us into suspending disbelief. Most of Life of Pi was created by the manipulation of ones and zeroes in a computer. Lee and his actors were working mainly in a shallow pool on a sound stage in Taiwan - it was a video effects team that turned that pool into an ocean, and created a Bengal tiger named “Richard Parker” to interact with the young actor who played the title character. (A real tiger was used in a few scenes, but 88 percent of the scenes employed the digital doppelganger.)
Lee - with the help of his VFX artists - created a fantastic world that dithered the line between the real world and the imagined one, and at times seemed more an animated film than a live-action one. Like James Cameron’s Avatar, the technology was impressive, although Lee managed to infuse his movie with a genuine human warmth (that occasionally approached mawkishness).
As an achievement, Life of Pi is impressive and a bit worrisome - it brings us a step closer to the day when human actors become superfluous, when a director might design and download his own particular creatures, who might perform with more precision than their analog components. Though Lee caused a bit of controversy with his failure to acknowledge the VFX team who worked on Life of Pi during his acceptance speech (a particularly insensitive move considering that Rhythm & Hues, the effects house that did most of the work on Life of Pi, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection a couple of weeks before the Oscar ceremony), in the long run the success of Life of Pi might be seen as an important step toward an all-digital cinema.
While Lee has groused about the high costs of digital effects work, over time the costs associated with the technology are obviously going to come down. It won’t always be an expensive proposition to build a Bengal tiger in a lab. Already digital green screen effects are within the reach of modest student productions. In the future, a director might have even more control of the frame than is now possible - actors might be reduced to a panel of dials and sliders; worlds might be synthesized by the clacking of keyboards.
But it is a very different thing to do with bytes and bits what Jessica Chastain does in Zero Dark Thirty, and it seems to me difficult to find many equivalencies between what Bigelow and Lee respectively accomplished. I think Life of Pi is a nice fable that folds up at the end, although my problem is less with Lee’s movie than his source material. There is a line in there somewhere about how one looks into the eyes of an animal, and sees only one’s reflection - which one then takes as a soul. But looking into the digital eyes of Richard Parker, we see only what Ang Lee has decided to place there. Looking into the eyes of Jessica Chastain’s Maya, we glimpse our species’ particular pain - our human awareness of what is mortal and what is moral.
E-mail:
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
Style, Pages 47 on 03/17/2013